Retailers have moved beyond shock and onto practicalities

Looking back to this year’s World Retail Congress I can’t help but think that Rose’s words perfectly fit the mood of delegates there. There was a definite sense that attendees were past the shock stage that followed the economic crisis.

Instead, there was more talk about the practicalities of retail life: which strategies are working, who is best implementing them and how to make sure you emerge a winner from the downturn. As Tesco international director Philip Clarke said: “It is important to keep going in a recession and this recession will end.”

But as a backdrop to these conversations, there was also a sense that the world is changing fundamentally. These changes are being driven by the internet and social networking at a speed that is both exciting and scary.

Some of the key facts are well known and figured prominently in presentations in Barcelona – that there are over 200 million registered users on Facebook and that if it were a country it would be the fifth largest in the world.

The retail implications were brought vividly to life by the teams of retail students competing in the Retail Futures Challenge. Teams from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Fashion Retail Academy in London and the Hong Kong Polytechnic battled it out to sell their ideas for a new retail concept for 2012.

All three concepts were driven by new technologies and the internet. Not only were the students outstandingly confident presenters, but they took seasoned retailers by surprise with their fresh thinking and grasp of the power of innovation.

So much so that one of the judges, La Rinascente chief executive Vittorio Radice, summarised the impact on him of the student competition and the market changes they described by concluding: “I came to the World Retail Congress an arrogant innovator… I am leaving a humble student.”

And, to give everyone here hope for the future of retail, London won the competition.